IN PRINT: Waters Rising
The Agreements We Make
This year, at the University of Waterloo, in a closed room of peculiar humans, Larry Smith held court. If you’ve had the pleasure, you know exactly what I mean. It’s a unique thing, not to be confused with many other things.
In his lecture, he offered a definition of economic development that surprised me - that economic development is, at it’s core, a process a community and it’s people go through to express their full potential.
I - with a fair helping of shame - admit that I hadn’t considered the discipline in those terms, and that makes me more jealous than I care to admit (something Larry Smith tends to do to other communicators).
I was jealous because, as far as I can tell, he’s right.
Again - economic development is a process a place and it’s people work to express their full potential. To get whatever it is they want. What we want changes as the culture and times do, but we all work a process to get there nonetheless. My grandfather would have loved being in that room.
So much of that process is rooted in human nature. It’s first principles stuff. Getting the fundamentals right, and then stacking growth on top of a strong base.
We are, by nature, a communal species and our growth and development as a group depends on the short and long-term agreements we make to one another. The former are often tactical agreements - like how we greet each other, how we show respect, if we abide by cultural norms like lining up and waiting our turn, or if we give up our seats to our elders. The latter are agreements in principle - the maintenance of our fundamental values like free-speech and democratic participation.
Some of these agreements are codified in law, but the law is not nearly enough to hold a community together. The agreements we make and the stories we tell ourselves, about ourselves, is the concrete of community. If all we can agree on is that we won’t break the law, and every other waking minute is spent living in an entirely different reality, we have no hope of a coherent municipal, provincial, or national story.
For Places, there are principles that form the foundation of growth. We need the energy, transportation, and communication systems necessary to make economic activity possible and sustainable. That’s Rifkin. The terms of that activity are often dictated by geography, technology, and human institutions. That’s Sachs. All growth on top of the foundation, it seems, can be broadly attributed to people gains or productivity gains.
For People, we need to feel productive and a part of a human system in a way that makes us feel useful. Ideally, combining our early inclinations with our God-given abilities, to go out into the world and do something productive, on behalf of the whole. In this way, we feel needed. Like we’re doing something worth doing, beyond ourselves. This seems to be the essential human condition. The roots of our disease at the minute are probably because we were designed to go out into the world and work together in the sun, and now we beeboopbeeboop on a computer screen, alone, for 10 hours a day.
“…If you had no need, the matrix wouldn’t form itself, because need is the driving force. if you believe there is a singularity - a oneness to the universe - the force that would maintain that is need.” -Stutz
I wrote about being needed in Waters Rising - the first thing I ever published in print. Regardless of how mediums and publishing change over time, we all want print. There is something old and true about it. I met James Mullinger for breakfast, laid out the story, as I saw it, and he took a risk on publishing a much younger me - on a story that probably wasn’t clear until I wrote it. It combined multiple stories of consequence, and drew a parallel line between them. To me, the connection was obvious.
If you’re going to write often, you’re inevitably going to get things wrong. That’s the natural consequence of working in public. Sometimes, with enough luck, you get it right, and you know you get it right when the principle keeps coming back, or people tell you how much they needed it.
Waters Rising keeps coming back.
I enjoy re-publishing past work in print because you get to see how naive you were, even a few short years ago. There is so much you would add - so much fat you’d trim. But you can’t because it was in print and, again, that’s some kind of immortal magic.
Instead of changing the text from it’s original, I’ll write a new introduction below, and then add an excerpt from the original that makes the point, and ties it to the importance of the agreements we make.
Enjoy the companion track below, and thank you for reading.
“…If you had no need, the matrix wouldn’t form itself, because need is the driving force. if you believe there is a singularity - a oneness to the universe - the force that would maintain that is need.” -Stutz
TL;DR: Combining our early inclinations, with our God-given abilities, in service of something greater than ourselves is as good as it gets. In this way, we feel useful, needed, and satisfied. We can all find this within ourselves, and we can start today.
I. The Agreements We Make & The Way of Things
A quick note on this post’s companion track. You’ll remember it’s particularly viral moment - first discovered by most of us on YouTube and casually climbing to 165 million views.
Some called it the Battle Hymn of The Republic for our times. Some of my inkfinger friends, regrettably, took to their Substack newsletters to dissect what Oliver got wrong in his ode to life, as he sees it, in modern Virginia. I like Noah, but I think he missed the point and the “reaction” genre is tired and overdone. We all feel it.
Why? Because you haven’t met this man. You haven’t sat across the table from him and broken bread or tasted his mothers homecooking. You don’t know his experience of life, and not one of us measures our own experience of life by facts and figures. You don’t know the soul of a place by measuring it’s GDP, and you don’t know it’s people by watching cable news.
Perhaps I’m being hard on Noah, and others like him who did the same, but it’s fairly clear to me that whether Rich Men North of Richmond is true is beside the point. It is squarely not the point. Now, to be fair, I don’t think it’s entirely irrelevant either. But it isn’t the point for a very simple reason, rooted in deep time and human nature - refuting what he’s saying point by point with facts and figures will do absolutely nothing to change his mind. We’re not rational like that. We never have been.
What matters is how people feel about the place and time they’re in. The real days that they live, over and over - not the days you believe they should be living by showing them comparative statistics.
I asked the very question of a friend of mine who works on the railroads of Mexico. “Are young people hopeful? Are they optimistic?” For all of Mexico’s challenges, yes, they are hopeful and they do believe that a bright future is on offer for them. How we get there is dependent on the commitments we make to ourselves, and the agreements we make to each other.
Back to Virginia. Listen to Oliver sing. Look at where he is. His dogs at his feet, camp chair, the setting sun (still hot), the hunting blind over his left shoulder. An entire way of life in one frame. An entire experience of life.
The question is not - did you get the facts right. The question is - do you believe tomorrow will be better than today? Do you have meaningful work and a community of meaningful relationships? You don’t change someones minds by offering them a print out from Stats Can, and you’d be terribly naive to think so. You change someones mind by being in relationship with them. By talking to them and asking them questions about their life. Listening. Curious, not judgemental.
I know it isn’t easy. Especially when we think someone else believes something egregious - maybe even something that isn’t true, or is hateful. But we don’t change their minds by saying something that sounds good in a tweet - like “You’re not entitled to your own facts.” All we’ve done then is made ourselves feel better because we’ve proven our virtue - but don’t be so naive as to think that you’ve changed their mind or made progress toward your cause. You haven’t.
Culture, to me, is simply the sum-total of the agreements we make.
The waters are rising - are we ready to agree on what that means?
II. Waters Rising (Excerpt)
“…When you drive through Crescent Valley during Ramadan, the most sacred month of the Islamic calendar, half of the neighbourhood is sleeping, and the other half is talking loudly between mouthfuls of grape leaves, chicken, rice, and warm pita. Front laws are dotted with men sitting cross-legged, gesturing with their hands as if words have no meaning without the accompanying animation. Their faces are lit dimly by the faint orange light of the tip of a cigarette. You can’t stop if you have somewhere to go. If you do stop, you will be invited to sit, virtually pulled by the arm towards the nearly incomparable level of hospitality of Saint John’s Muslim population.
Sunset cuts the ribbon on the iftar feast, and the house smells of cigarettes and spice. Farhan sits across from me with one leg up on his chair, wearing a black tank-top. His skin is dotted with ink of Arabic script, criss-crossed by the veins in his forearms. His thin beard and heavy brow give him a hard look. I wonder if his brow has always been like this, or if shouldering the responsibility of life during the Syrian civil war made it this way: a hard time for hard people.
It’s clear to me that the thick calluses on his hands and the ropey muscle of his forearms are the product of years of labour - of hard work. He is sipping hot, jet-black coffee long before I can. These are the hands of someone who has been working since he was 12. The hands of someone who has worked hard to provide; far harder, perhaps, than someone his age should have had to. The hands of someone who has always had responsibility and has always been needed. Hard work is in Farhan’s blood.
In the community Farhan is known as Abu Talal, father of Talal, his oldest son. He plays soccer hard, as if doing anything halfway is anathema, against a moral code that he keeps to himself. Mahmoud, Talal, Reem, Najah and little Zein look at their dad as if he has the strength of Apollo, but his wife Rasha smirks, as if she knows something about his vulnerabilities that I do not. I too find myself talking to Farhan as if I owe him some kind of unspoken respect. Perhaps I regret that a man who stands as straight as Farhan doesn’t feel as if he is needed in his new home…
…Our Maritime traditions are deeply rooted in hard work, thick skin and community. Faster than could be recognized (or prepared for), the world has been shrinking. The era of the homogeneous classroom is over. The era of the homogeneous workforce is over. The era of the homogeneous community is over. Our communities are changing, but our obligation to one another has not and will not. We need each other here. We always have…
…On the night we broke bread I asked Farhan what it meant to him to not be needed. His answer was measured and acute: it was shame. Shame, because we are often bound by the ties of our culture. It had always been an expectation that Farhan would produce and that the productivity function would be working with his hands. He hasn’t worked steadily since the day he landed in Saint John over two years ago. This, I contend, is what is shameful.
As is his way, he makes another observation about his community. Crescent Valley, a community transforming into a bastion of culture, song, dance and colourful dress, is home to residents who are suffering from a lack of purpose. Farhan accurately and unapologetically observes that in New Brunswick we have forgotten how much we need one another and we’re suffering because of it. Farhan and I acknowledge each other with silence and direct eye contact. The beginning of a friendship…
…Without being prompted, Farhan becomes as animated as I’ve ever seen him. He feels “miserable” and “useless” to not be leaving home every morning to give his sweat to the city he now calls home. I start to wonder if there is anything as powerful as shame. Farhan draws an analogy to his faith, the idea of haram, that it is against his moral and religious code to be only receiving, not giving. Anathema to everything he has ever stood for, and unacceptable for his new life in Canada…
I wonder (not entirely in my head) that as Farhan looks down at his hands and sees his thick, dark calluses begin to lighten and recede, if a piece of who he is, who he has always been, goes with them? Is the leathery texture of 25 years of hard work as much a part of him as his hands themselves? As I leave his home, I see the dark-blue cigarette smoke rise from circles of expressive, cross-legged men, and my mind is clear: Farhan dug sand for three days straight because that is who he is. His hands were doing, once more, what they had always done. I see photos in the Telegraph-Journal of the men whom I’ve known for more than two years smiling after a hard day’s work, those calloused hands gripping the wooden handles of steel shovels, the dirt on their pants painting the picture of a community that needs them….”
Next time, the case against accelerationism.
“Some of the historic buildings, especially the Cathedrals, still have a dignity and heft, cultural buttes in a desert eroded by pagan winds, which can only last so much longer, since many have given over to being museums more than houses of worship.” - Chris Arnade
See you on the path.
-MG